“Stupid in America” is a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America’s public schools and it’s about time we face up to it.
Kids at New York’s Abraham Lincoln High School told me their teachers are so dull students fall asleep in class. One student said, “You see kids all the time walking in the school smoking weed, you know. It’s a normal thing here.”
Somehow this doesn’t invite, to me, a sense of trust with the public schools in my area (though I live far from New York and Washington, D.C. Of course, I’ve known for a long time that the schools in my area were seriously lacking. But what can you do? Send your kid to a Catholic school? That’s an idea if you’re even the slightest bit Christian, but I don’t fall into that catagory.
I got Lil’ Miss’ report card for the first nine weeks and completely freaked out. She was doing absolutely horrid. And no one at the school had bothered to let me know that my kid was falling so far behind. I had to sit with her for 2 hours a day for weeks to get her grades back up. I still haven’t heard anything from her teachers. I tried to get in contact with a couple of them, but they brushed me off. I’ve always known that the public schools were Teacher vs. Parent, but at the last school district (where we lived before) they at least made an effort to pretend we were working together. This one doesn’t. Oh! But they get excellent scores on state proficiency tests. Yay.
Someone I graduated with (in 1991) can’t even read the newspaper without difficulty. And her grammar is atrocious. Her parents didn’t care if she had a proper education and so didn’t help her at all through school. And the school officials didn’t care. She was pretty much left in the cold.
My mother fought with my little sister’s first school- all the time. They wanted her put on Ritalin and placed in a Learning Disorder class. But my little sister did fine at home. It was the teacher that was bad. My mother put her in a Catholic school and her grades went straight up to A’s and B’s. Also, my sister didn’t need the drugs afterall. Just an administration that cared.
My experiences (that I’ve listed) aren’t uncommon. And this article highlights that. It’s a damned shame that the needs and wants of the teachers are so more important that the wants and needs of the students. I can understand that sometimes they get frustrated with lack of parental involvement. But it seems to me that this particular school district tries to discourage any parental involvement at all. Them vs. Us, and it’s pretty disgusting.
Lying to Beat the SystemGena Cain, like most parents, doesn’t have a choice which public school her kids attend. She followed the rules, and her son paid the price.
In San Jose, Calif., some parents break the rules to get their kids into Fremont Union schools. They’re so much better than neighboring schools that parents sometimes cheat to get their kids in by pretending to live in the school district.
“We have maybe hundreds of kids who are here illegally, under false pretenses,” said District Superintendent Steve Rowley.
Inspector John Lozano works for the district going door-to-door to check if kids really live where they say they live. And even seeing that a child is present at a particular address isn’t enough. Lozano says he needs to look inside the house to make sure the student really lives there.
Think about what he’s doing. The school district police send him into your daughter’s bedroom. He even goes through drawers and closets if he has to.
At one house he found a computer and some teen magazines and pictures of a student with her friends. He decided that student passed the residency test.
But a grandmother who listed an address in his district is caught. The people who answered the door when Lozano visited told him she didn’t live there.
Two days later, I talked with the grandmother who tried to get her grandson into the Fremont schools.
“I was actually crying. I was crying in front of this 14-year-old. Why can’t they just let parents to get in the school of their choice?” she asked.
Why can’t she make a choice? It’s sad that school officials force her to go to the black market to get her grandson a better education. After we started calling the school, the school did decide to let him stay in the district.
We don’t have many choices unless the state lets us have a choice. And that is fought tooth and nail by the teacher’s unions. They don’t want to lose the money or the control.
I’m going to be home schooling Baby. She deserves a better education than what’s available to her in this town.
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